We need better ways of talking about nature and our relationships with it, writes Guardian columnist George Monbiot

If Moses had promised the Israelites a land flowing with mammary secretions and insect vomit, would they have followed him into Canaan? Though this means milk and honey, I doubt it would have inspired them.

So why do we use such language to describe the natural wonders of the world? There are examples everywhere, but I will illustrate the problem with a few from the UK. On land, places in which nature is protected are called sites of special scientific interest. At sea, they are labelled no-take zones or reference areas. Had you set out to estrange people from the living world, you could scarcely have done better.

Even the term reserve is cold and alienating think of what we mean when we use that word about a person. The environment is just as bad: an empty word that creates no pictures in the mind. Wild animals and plants are described as resources or stocks, as if they belong to us and their role is to serve us: a notion disastrously extended by the term ecosystem services.

Our assaults on life and beauty are also sanitised and disguised by the words we use. When a species is obliterated by people, we use the term extinction. It conveys no sense of our role in the extermination, and mixes up this eradication with the natural turnover of species. Its like calling murder expiration. Climate change also confuses natural variation with the catastrophic disruption we cause: a confusion deliberately exploited by those who deny our role. (Even this neutral term has now been banned from use in the US Department of Agriculture.) I still see ecologists referring to improved pasture, meaning land from which all life has been erased other than a couple of plant species favoured for grazing or silage. We need a new vocabulary.

Words possess a remarkable power to shape our perceptions. The organisation Common Cause discusses a research project in which participants were asked to play a game. One group was told it was called the Wall Street Game, while another was asked to play the Community Game. It was the same game. But when it was called the Wall Street Game, the participants were consistently more selfish and more likely to betray the other players. There were similar differences between people performing a consumer reaction study and a citizen reaction study: the questions were the same, but whenpeople saw themselves as consumers, they were more likely to associate materialistic values with positive emotions.

Words encode values that are subconsciously triggered when we hear them. When certain phrases are repeated, they can shape and reinforce a worldview, making it hard for us to seean issue differently. Advertisers and spin doctors understand this all too well: they know that they can trigger certain responses by using certain language. But many of those who seek to defend the living planet seem impervious to this intelligence.

On Sunday evening, I went to see the beavers that have begun to repopulate the river Otter in Devon. I joined the people quietly processing up the bank to their lodge. The friend I walked with commented: Its like a pilgrimage, isnt it? When we arrived at the beaver lodge, we found a crowd standing in total silence under the trees. When first a kingfisher appeared, then a beaver, you could read the enchantment and delight in every face. Our awe of nature, and the silence we must observe when we watch wild animals, hints, I believe, at the origins of religion.

So why do those who seek to protect the living planet and who were doubtless inspired to devote their lives to it through the same sense of wonder and reverence so woefully fail to capture these values in the way they name the world?

Those who name it own it. The scientists who coined the term sites of special scientific interest were doubtless unwittingly staking a claim: this place is important because it is of interest to us. Those who describe the tiny fragments of seabed in which no commercial fishing is allowed as reference areas are telling us that the meaning and purpose of such places is as a scientific benchmark. Yes, they play that role. But to most people who dive there, they represent much more: miraculous refuges, thronged with creatures that thrill and astonish.

Rather than arrogating naming rights to themselves, professional ecologists should recruit poets and cognitive linguists and amateur nature lovers to help them find the words for what they cherish. Here are a few ideas. I hope, inthe comments that follow this article online, you can improve and add tothem.

If we called protected areas places of natural wonder, we would not only speak to peoples love of nature, but also establish an aspiration that conveys what they ought to be. Lets stop using the word environment, and use terms such as living planet and natural world instead, as they allow us to form a picture of what we are describing. Lets abandon the term climate change and start saying climate breakdown. Instead of extinction, lets adopt the word promoted by the lawyer Polly Higgins: ecocide.

We are blessed with a wealth of nature and a wealth of language. Let us bring them together and use one to defend the other.